Persona 5 - The Not-So-Holy Grail
There is only one logical thing left to do for the Phantom Thieves. For their biggest heist yet, Joker and friends will be stealing the hearts of the public. In turn they will get rid of the Metaverse once and for all. It is time to plunge the depths of the mementos and save the soul of the nation. Once they get to the end of the last level of the Mementos, the Thieves find another door that can take them past the point of no return.
There are people imprisoned here who do not want to leave because they are comfortable not having to think for themselves. Some of the people the Thieves have defeated, such as Kamoshida, are also in here. Witnessing all of the public taking the safety of prison over uncertainty of freedom shakes Joker’s faith in what he has been trying to achieve. If the people do not want to be free, is it really worth fighting for their freedom? It does not help Igor keeps telling him to leave everyone be. The bliss of ignorance is like a siren’s call. It dulls the struggle only until one crashes into the jagged rocks reality. The obliviousness takes away all the intrusive thoughts and lets one exist in the warm embrace of oblivion. But is that a life anyone really wants to live?
Joker decides he would rather struggle and be free than be blissful and ignorant. The friends agree with his assessment and everyone decides to keep going deeper until they can find the one who is corrupting the thoughts of all of the public.
I found the puzzles in this area to be interesting even though they weren’t anything new. Joker has to walk on the spaces in a specific order to make them all be the same color. They were just difficult enough to be satisfying when I solved them, but not frustratingly hard at the same time. Later on, the difficulty is increased when the game asks the player to complete it in a certain number of turns, but that was not too har either. Being Level 99 with the whole party made the enemy encounters almost insignificant, so traversal wasn’t as challenging as the first run.
The Thieves are now deep enough in the Mementos where the scenery has switched from slightly unsettling to downright horrific. The stairs are rib cages and the pipes running all around us resemble arteries. This is how Pinocchio must have felt when he was inside the whale. If you thought Persona 5 could not be any more red, guess again. Everything is crimson, except for when it blends into dark shadows. At the bottom of this hellscape is a grail into which all the arteries terminate. The subversion of the grail symbolism is hard to miss. The holy grail has been a symbol of religious purity ever since it was popularized by the Arthurian legends. It was the ultimate goal of the Knights of the Round Table, many of whom could not attain it due to the impurity of their souls. There are two levels of subversion here. Grail is the ultimate symbol of corruption here. It is at the bottom of Mementos, which is Persona’s representation of hell. I can not help but think the game is trying say something akin to “religion is the opiate of the masses”. On my first play through, I thought it came out of nowhere. Although the shadows are borrowed from different religious mythologies, the grail invoked religion more directly than anything else that came before it. I am still not sure why the theme of “religion as a corrupting force” is introduced so late in the game.
The second thing be subverted here is the idea of Grail being the ultimate goal of any quest. Here the Grail is clearly not the final boss. It is a battle we must fight before we go on to battle the true final boss. In the legends, Galahad was one of the achievers of the Holy Grail. Doing so completed his purpose in life to such finality, he no longer needed to be alive. But here The Grail just another obstacle on the way to the final fight.
As the fight starts, it quickly becomes clear to the whole team, they cannot do any substantial damage to this monster. The Grail is feeding on the lifeblood of the inmates. It does not matter how much we damage it, the will of the people negates any damage done to it. All it does is make the grail shinier. The grail kicks the Thieves out of Mementos and into Shibuya. That is not all, the Metaverse and our world start merging. The people who we have maxed out ranks with are able to notice the change, but everyone else seems to be completely. The people are too involved in the frivolities of their lives to remember anything important. As a side effect, the Phantom Thieves start to fade out of the combine cognition of the public. At the same time, they start fading away quite literally. As his friends turn into ash, Joker wakes up to find himself in the prison cell that represents the Velvet Room for him.
Joker has failed his rehabilitation, but Igor is oddly happy about it. He sentences Joker to be executed with unconcealed glee. It would not be a JRPG if there wasn’t an unwinnable fight in here. There is not much to do as Justine and Caroline give Joker a thorough beating. Even as he is beaten down, Joker is able to remind the two girls who they used to be. They are two parts of one person, torn apart by a malevolent force. This one person, named Lavenza, finally unmasks the entity who had been pretending to be Igor. This God of Control leaves and the real Igor is released from his grasp. Joker is reintroduced to the Velvet Room. His friends are also somewhere here, and they need to be regathered. In one of the more tedious portions of the game, Joker goes through the whole prison maze, and talks everyone of the Phantom Thieves out of their funk. Finally, the whole team is ready to find out what is going on and how to put a stop to it.
Morgana remembers who he is and how he was made to guide the Hero through the metaverse to achieve his true destiny. He leads the whole team out of the Velvet Room and toward the Malevolent God. As they get closer to facing this god, the public starts waking up to the dystopian horror their world has become. Soon we will be facing the ultimate battle for the reality of our universe.
